Implantable electronic medical devices are generally implanted into under the skin of a body, and thus, it is required to facilitate wireless communication for exchanging data with an implantable electronic medical device. Wireless communication protocols, which are presently used, are mostly for transmitting and receiving large-scale data and have a complicated hierarchical structure. Also, data that are transmitted and received based on current wireless communication protocol include voice and/or image data, and moreover include web information recently. However, it is inefficient that the complicated hierarchical structure is applied to implantable medical devices for reliably transferring small-scale data in terms of power consumption by devices or data transmission efficiency.
To date, there is no standardized communication protocol applied to implantable electronic medical devices. At present, a specific method developed by a manufacturer of an implantable electronic medical device is used.
Therefore, in implantable electronic medical devices, communication protocol is necessary for reliable communication irrespective of the kind of a channel through which data are transferred. For this reason, methods for reliable communication are being studied by those skilled in the art.